This Is Water

In 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class at Kenyon College with a speech that is now one of his most read pieces. In it, he argues, gorgeously, against “unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” He begins with a parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

When Wallace died, on September 12th, the water churned. Fittingly for a writer whose work encircled itself with annotations, he will leave a legacy composed not only of his novels and essays, and of pieces written about him—official obituaries, elegies, and scholarly papers—but also of a vast and growing system of Web sites, e-mails, message boards, and blogs—and comments on those blogs, and comments on those comments, ad infinitum. His life has a lot of footnotes:

A professor at Amherst remembers Wallace, who babysat his kids, and the writer’s virtuosic senior year at the college.

John Seery, Wallace’s colleague and workout buddy, reveals that Wallace once thanked him for accompanying him to a party otherwise full of gym rats, whom he was afraid might force him to do their algebra homework.

Wallace, from a 1999 interview with Amherst magazine: “I fluctuate between periods of terrible sloth and paralysis and periods of high energy and production, but from what I know about other writers this isn’t unusual.”

An ever-growing accumulation of first-person homages on McSweeney’s, including the simple statement “He helped me to stop wrecking my life, showed me how to help other people and why I should bother."

Pomona students recall their professor, both in the classroom and on the tennis court: “He had a complete game, the kind that comes from years of obsessing over stroke technique and ball location. If there was one sign that he was more than an above-par recreational player, it was the fact that he would employ a relatively advanced tactic, what tennis geeks call ‘taking the ball off the rise.’ It requires sharp reflexes and timing. He did it repeatedly that summer afternoon in 2005."

A series of responses on Metafilter that accumulate like a snowball rolling down a hill. One of the more recent: “I have felt really alive lately, really engaged in my life to a degree that I hadn’t been for a few years, but this was like a punch in the gut. And the head. And the heart.” The post comes with footnotes.

Among the best of Wallace’s fellow-writers’ recollections is Ben Kunkel’s, in n+1: “The real grief is in the death of a great artist and a kind man.”

“The Howling Fantods,” a fan site, memorializes, compiles, and understates: “To say that David Foster Wallace has had a profound influence on my life, the way I think, and the way in which I perceive the world, is an understatement.” (Elsewhere on the site, among numerous links, are Wallace’s uncollected writings.)

All of this is, no doubt, just the tip of the iceberg, peeking out of the sea. At Kenyon, Wallace elaborated on his water parable:

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about....The fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.

And, nearing the end of his speech:

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

This is water.

This is water.

Jenna Krajeski has contributed to Harper’s, The Nation, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and was a 2016 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.